Cutting AWS Spend Without Cutting Capability

The Challenge

A fast-growing retail technology platform was spending $180,000 per month on AWS with no formal cost governance structure. The engineering team moved fast in building product — but nobody owned the bill. Over two years, resource sprawl had accumulated across 14 AWS accounts with overlapping VPCs, unattached EBS volumes, idle EC2 instances, and over-provisioned RDS clusters running around the clock.

Leadership knew costs were out of control but didn't have the internal expertise to diagnose root causes or trust that reductions could be made without impacting system performance during peak retail events.

Our Approach

Skygate Advisors began with a two-week FinOps assessment using AWS Cost Explorer, Trusted Advisor, and Compute Optimizer. We mapped every dollar of spend to a specific workload or resource and categorized findings into four buckets: immediate waste elimination, right-sizing candidates, scheduling opportunities, and Reserved Instance conversion candidates.

The Results

At the end of the 8-week engagement, the client's monthly AWS spend had dropped from $180K to $102.5K — a 43% reduction, equating to $930,000 in annualized savings. Application performance metrics were unchanged throughout, and the company's largest retail event (a national promotional sale) ran on the optimized infrastructure with record-low latency.

Beyond the cost savings, the client left with a FinOps operating model: a cost governance calendar, monthly review process, budget owner assignments for each AWS account, and automated anomaly alerting. Eighteen months after the engagement, costs have remained within 5% of the optimized baseline despite 40% revenue growth.